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Mentors a guiding light to career success

New entrants can find the mortgage broking world a maze, but mentors can offer valuable direction and guidance. We speak to Nancy Youssef of Classic Mentoring and Coaching, Graham Wearn of AMW Wealth and Sally Ashcroft of Finanz Essentials for their thoughts on how mentoring can add value to a business.

Video transcript below:

Donna Sawyer, Australian Broker TV
Donna Sawyer: Finding your way into the mortgage broking world can be a bit of a maze. A mentor can give new entrants or even seasoned professionals the direction they need. Graham Wearn of AMW Wealth says he found a mentor after making a career switch.

Graham Wearn, AMW Wealth

Graham Wearn: Yes, I have worked in the bank. I know about lending, about loans and so forth and I have been stock broker, so I know how to talk to people and to get people to do things and to assist them. And mortgage broking brings two of those things together, but it’s also different in a lot of ways and I mean being a mentee obviously brings a structure to that process. By that I mean you are given quite a defined business plan.

Sally Ashcroft, Finanz Essentials

Sally Ashcroft: Having a mentor has really added value to my business. As I mentioned I was working for a mortgage broker, so I have been helped in terms of establishing business, all the regulatory requirements, also the marketing, the business plan, the total aspect of the business and that’s what I loved about the program. It covers the total business, not just helping you with loan structuring and talking to the banks.

Sally Ashcroft: Finding the right mentor is really important. You have to have someone that has the time to train you. My preference was the MFAA’s mentor program because it was structured, because the mentors are, they are trainers and from the word go you have got the full business structure.

Graham Wearn: Things that I would put off which were difficult things like marketing and selling financial products in general, they are fairly confronting things, going out and marketing yourself to sell things. They are fairly challenging things to do, but with a mentor, you have to do it and you are accountable to your mentor and so there is no escape from confronting your worst fears and it grows the business.

Nancy Youssef, Classic Mentoring & Coaching

Nancy Youssef: The mortgage industry is a very exciting profession, we all know that, we are all in it. A lot of new entrants that join the industry don’t have the right support and unfortunately the industry does have a high attrition rate amongst new brokers with about two-thirds not making it past the first 12 months. In light of that we are looking to lift the, you know the success rate, where I have found that to be very successful with my mentees is to be able to provide that ongoing support.

Nancy Youssef: It’s really important for a new entrant to have an MFAA approved mentor in that they know that the time is going to be allocated for a proper structured approach, whilst we have already identified that experienced brokers have got all the technical knowledge, not all of them are really good at training and being able to teach new entrants.

Donna Sawyer: This is Donna Sawyer reporting for Australian Broker TV.